


A Liar and a Coward

by Von



Category: INSIDE (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:08:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25378180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Von/pseuds/Von
Summary: The reason why.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	A Liar and a Coward

**Author's Note:**

> Have been trying to get back into a writing habit, which means indulging random notions. One-shot.

They used to wait. Let the children grow up, before stripping their minds away.

Then, one day, someone in power said: Why?

Children are noisy and greedy and cruel. They are messy and wilful and their bodies designed to appeal to the eyes of adults. Adults who get emotionally attached. Adults who make exceptions.

Exceptions cannot be made. It destabilises the system. Breeds discontent and rebellion.

Only the chosen may have children.

He is not chosen. Barely more than a serf, he works for the company but is far from irreplaceable. He'd hoped and prayed his son would be better, would be chosen, by the time he came of age to be wiped.

His son is not chosen.

He doesn't know about the decision until it's too late. Until he gets home and his son is gone and his friends tell him to shut up about it.

Less than a week later, serfs deliver a small box to his door. His son, now his personal serf, his reward for compliance, is tucked neatly inside.

His eyes are half-lidded. He breathes, he blinks, but that which makes him his son has been murdered.

There is a helmet within the box. A small local broadcaster. A slip of information. Until his son- until his son's body reaches the age of 18, it is his to use as he wills. Domestic service. If the company has no particular need for him at 18, he can apply to purchase his use for the rest of his life.

If he lives that long.

That night, as he cradles the warm living corpse of his baby boy, he thinks of how easily he could cover his small nose and mouth. Could end the desecration of his son's memory. The company would no doubt wipe him for it if he did. His son is just property now. Theirs, on loan, until he's old enough to be used for labor. All of them in service to the greater, communal good.

He thinks of murder-suicide.

He's frightened. Ashamed.

He... He doesn't think he could do it. His son, yes. Gods, yes. But himself?

...no.

All these years, working for the company, supporting in so many small ways their merciless cruelties, he's been telling himself that he does it for his son. Suffers the rot to his soul. Keeps living so as not to leave him alone.

A liar as well as a coward.

The next day, he leaves his son at home, tucked into bed. Goes to work like a fucking serf himself. That's what they all are, aren't they? Serfs who choose to be serfs, out of fear of being _made_ to be.

Others are like him, white-faced and red-eyed. Some are missing. Nobody speaks of them. Nobody speaks of what they all must have at home.

One man says something, he doesn't hear it himself, only sees another snap instantly into a rage, beating the first man with his chair, his computer monitor, with his bleeding fists. He sees nobody try to stop him, not until security comes to drag him away.

He never comes back. Nobody talks about _him_ , either.

He finishes the day, goes home, checks on his son and holds a pillow in his hand for almost an hour.

He tips a small tube of nutrient juice down his throat instead. His son won't feed himself without external instruction, without puppetry. Repetitive instructions can be planted, in a 'do X until Y or until told to stop' fashion if they're simple enough, but he thinks that might be worse. To violate his son's mind just to make his body give the illusion that there's still someone inside it.

He eats his own supper, then vomits it back up.

The next day, he goes to work.

And the next.

And the next.

And the next.

Nobody talks about it. A few more disappear.

Nobody talks about them.

One night, he pushes the pillow down hard. Small hands don't stir, don't try to stop him, to survive, so he can only wait until the thin, narrow chest stops moving.

Then he throws the pillow away and drops to his knees, hysterical, drags his son to the floor to give him CPR, forcing air into him, shoving at his chest, sobbing apologies, desperate to undo what he'd done.

All of it. Everything.  
Every failure as a father, as a man, as a human.

His son coughs and breathes again, but he's still _dead_ behind his eyes.

He pulls him into his arms and cries.

The next day, he goes to work.

-

6 months pass, and he's transferred to the control system department. They're expanding again, as their stock is shipped ever outward to service other areas.

He's still a nobody, just a small cog in a gigantic machine, barely worth keeping his position. Hell, when the expansion is done, he's probably scheduled to be made redundant.

But he meets new people. Talks about work with them. Learns what other obscenities the company is developing, all discussed with the careful detachment of scientific interest.

Whichever department you go, there are nothing but cowards like him.

He learns about the mermen and maids, serfs internally reconfigured to obtain oxygen when underwater, that they can labor in the dark and depths, perform maintenance, all at so much less of an expense than through specialised machinery.

How clever, he agrees. That night, he dreams of what might have been. If he'd been good enough to be placed on that project sooner. Dreams of sneaking the treatment to his son, and then abandoning him to the ocean to live alone and afraid - but unviolated.

Another day, he learns about the clone project, the company's solution for when serf demand exceeds supply. After all, the world is over-populated now but with serfs not reproducing - not without putting the female stock out of operation for 7 months at a time anyway, the control system thrown off by the secondary developing brain - it's inevitable that they will soon not be able to even maintain current levels.

How forward thinking, he agrees, wrapping both hands around his coffee cup, to hide his white-knuckled grip.

Why didn't they start with cloning, he doesn't ask. Another thing everybody knows and nobody talks about is that the 'need' for serfs has always been more about thinning the population than any true disaster recovery.

Give workers unions and they start demanding rights. Give the lower class freedom and they start thinking they're entitled to it.

Serfs are the solution and the stick for those who remain. Slave labour for a species built upon it. The boogeyman for middle-workers who must be suffered to exist but should remember their place.

One day, in lowered voices, they gossip about The Huddle. A deviation of the cloning project gone wrong. A mass of biology that doesn't _seem_ to have a will of its own, but which actively consumes any human body - clone or otherwise - that gets too close and adds it to its mass. The control system doesn't work on it, they say. Too many divergent minds, empty or otherwise, they speculate. Maybe a filter might work. They just need to send in a serf holding one. Trial and error. Send another to attach some sensors. Lucky it's not sentient enough to object, right? It'd be a bit of a mess if it did, wouldn't it? Hahaha.

The company wants options for The Huddle. His colleagues have been charged to work something out. He doesn't envy them.

He **hates** them.

Hates them, hates the company, hates himself.

He loathes them, they who facilitate evil every day and still bitch about Jane not replacing the coffee filter. They who wear the masks of their status like it means something. Hiding behind its anonymity. They, who inspect the stock with their children close by like miniature lords learning the span of their empire while his own child lies empty at their behest.

One day, rattling about in the back of a truck off to install new equipment, he thinks about range. About filters. About entire cities under march while individual rooms and buildings ignore the call.

He looks at the equipment in the van with him.

And when he gets to the farm, he fixes what he came to fix.

And then builds another.

Almost another six months later - and several nights of throwing up everything he'd ever eaten, as he'd practiced moving his son around the house and set him to doing simple exercises designed to repair the damage done by his idleness - he's ready. He's built enough. His son's body is as fit as he can make it.

He's saved up his leave. He has almost three weeks to get this done.

He has food and water and a bucket nearby. All his drapes are closed and he's moved his heaviest furniture against the doors and downstairs windows.

This is stupid.  
Insane.

There's no chance of success, not really. He knows the boosters will cover the range to where he needs to go, but he's only seen a fraction of the path to get there.

This is stupid.

But his son is already gone. Abandoned in a ditch on the outskirts of the city. From the amount of small fingers and hands sticking up through the top layer of muck, he'd been far from the first to do so.

No.

He breathes deep, puts the helmet on.

His son _will_ be avenged.

All he needs, is a little help from the inside.  



End file.
